marcopolo488 said
I think the way you should be going about is make a profit splitting partnership offer right off the bat. That way your financial position would be irrelevant. Also, you’d get a lot more designers than you would for your present offer.

I would be inclined to agree that this is the best way to get going with developeing from TF.

By the way, those of you that come down hard on designers, remember the designer has to keep coming up with original stuff every design he/she does, whereas the coder keeps doing the same thing again and again. I’m not saying coding isn’t difficult, but it just isn’t the rocket science some developers try to make it look like.

In my previous post, I wasn’t coming down hard on designers, being more of a designer myself, I was only referring to the fair split up of work/earnings based on my experience of collaboartion here on TF. I would disagree however that designing for TF, one needs to come up with original stuff on a constant basis, this imo is not true. Infact being original on TF is generaly more a recipe for disaster then for success. The vast majority of designs which are selling well here on TF are not original and have very little originality about them. Of course I’m not saying that creating them is easy of requires no skill, it does.

But from a pure “design” only point of view, you can’t compare it with say the task facing a creative director of a design firm who has lots of big clients,. These guys really have to come up with original stuff on a continuous basis. Now that would be a hard job.

You can create a PSD which would be accepted on TF within about 1 week.

To convert that to a responsive HTML template (assuming some custom js is also needed) would take 2-3 weeks. To convert that to a TF standard Wordpress theme which has some chance of competing, would take a further 2-3 weeks. This is not taking into account the time the developer has to invest in building a WP framework, writing extensive documentation, completing demo content, supporting the theme throughout its selling life span etc etc.

From my experience providing the PSD only is about 10-15% or less of the overall work required, hence a 50/50 split is unrealistic.

We are a team. Myself and my partner split things 50/50. I do all design, HTML , CSS, Documentation, Demo Content, Support and marketing/promotion. While my partner does JS, WP, Server Admin and Support. In our experience, this split up of the work warrants a 50/50 split of earnings, anything else wouldn’t.